Ladies who lunch

Several years ago, desperate to stick to my traditional lose-10-pounds New Year’s resolution, I decided to embark on a diet called the Master Cleanse. Unlike Weight Watchers, in which you keep meticulous track of everything that passes your lips, or Atkins, where you must survive on a balanced diet of bacon and bacon, the Master Cleanse is straightforward: You don’t eat. Instead, you drink “lemonade”—a concoction made of water, lemons, cayenne pepper and grade-B maple syrup.

Naomi Campbell,
who does the cleanse three times a year, once lived on the vile drink for 18 days, which may explain why she regularly strikes her assistants in the head with smartphones. What sold me was that Beyoncé swore by it. But unlike Beyoncé in too many ways to count, I made it seven hours before my first sandwich.

I’ll Have What She’s Having

By Rebecca HarringtonVintage, 161 pages, $14.95

Rebecca Harrington does a whole lot better in “I’ll Have What She’s Having: My Adventures in Celebrity Dieting.” She lasts on the spicy lemonade for an impressive four days before transitioning to Beyoncé’s post-pregnancy diet (turkey slices, cucumber and raw yellowtail) and two-hour-a-day workout regimen. All told, she loses 10 pounds in 10 days. Judging from her author photo, Ms. Harrington could stand to gain a few. She’s also not exactly a foodie: “Usually my dinner parties are miserable failures in which people start ordering sushi in front of me like I’m not even there.”

But, as she writes, “I have always enjoyed doing experiments on myself in the style of
Benjamin Franklin.
” Put another way: “If you knew that eating goji berries would make you look like
Jessica Biel,
why wouldn’t you do it?” Precisely.

Thus, over the course of “I’ll Have What She’s Having,” Ms. Harrington eats like 14 different celebrities, both dead and alive. Among them:
Madonna,
Jackie Kennedy,
Marilyn Monroe,
Karl Lagerfeld,
Dolly Parton,
and the GOOP goddess herself,
Gwyneth Paltrow.
Like many of her subjects, the book is a bit too slim: Fans of New York magazine’s blog the Cut will recognize many of the chapters. But for those who haven’t, the writing—though not the food—is delectable.

The bombshells of Hollywood’s golden age had some nasty ideas about how to lose weight, particularly the gorgeous yo-yo-er
Liz Taylor.
For her chapter on the late star, Ms. Harrington follows the diet laid out by Cleopatra in her 1987 book “Elizabeth Takes Off.” One dinner consists of a piece of bread topped with steak and slathered with peanut butter. “Despite being so hungry I could eat my hand, I cannot handle this concoction.” Ms. Harrington deems a breakfast of cottage cheese and sour cream poured over fruit “absolutely repugnant.” Taylor’s tuna salad consists of the following baffling combination: tomato paste, tuna, grapefruit, scallions and mayonnaise. “She is, in short, an excellent broad with really bad taste in food,” Ms. Harrington writes.

Greta Garbo
wasn’t much better. One of her staples was something called a “pep breakfast,” consisting of two raw eggs beaten in orange juice. “If pneumonia were a food, this is what it would taste like,” Ms. Harrington declares.

Today’s svelte celebrities have learned not to mix grapefruit with tomato paste. Their strategy is to just eat a very, very small amount of food.
Victoria Beckham,
for example, follows something more posh than spice called the Five Hands Diet. “You eat only five handfuls of food in a day and then for some unknown reason you declare yourself full. A fun surprise about this diet is that the portion is not even really the size of a hand. It’s actually the size of a palm.” The author, ravenous, can only bend it like Beckham’s wife for three days.

The legions of those who hate Gwyneth Paltrow for saying things like “I would rather die than let my kid eat Cup-a-Soup,” or for being genetically blessed, will be interested to know that hers is the most humane, enjoyable diet in the book. Save for the punishing exercise routines—“you hold tiny weights in your hand and then flap your arms wildly like a person in a Victorian insane asylum having an epileptic fit”—the meals include real food like barbecued chicken, avocado and almonds. By the time she has “consciously uncoupled” from the Gwynnie diet, Ms. Harrington has lost 4 pounds. Best of all, she doesn’t go to bed hungry.